This article first appeared on Mother Jones It has been republished with the publications permission

On July 15 when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee he brought along two new accessories One was a large bandage covering his ear which had been nicked by a wouldbe assassins bullet The other was Ohios firstterm senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful

He also suggests that liberals have poisoned Americas soil

Two days later after paying tribute to his wife Ushathe child of immigrants from Indiaand their three biracial kids Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters America is not just an idea he said solemnly It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future It is in short a nation

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To many viewers at home this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate patriotic stump speech But the words shared history lit up a farright evangelical corner of social media America is a particular place with a particular people Joel Webbon a Texas pastor and podcaster wrote on X This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe Answer it wrong we will go the way of Europe where the nativeborn populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims Answer it right and we can renew America once more

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs America should belong to Christians and more specifically white ones The American nation is an actual historical people says Stephen Wolfe no relation to William the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities but actually a place of settlement and rootedness For this group of evangelical leaders Vance a 40yearold former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and womens revered role as mothers was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism

For years graying khakiclad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events However as Wolfe a 41yearold former Princeton postdoc writes in his book these men in wrinkled shortsleeve golf shirts sitting plump in their seats are yesterdays Christians Among younger activists they inspire the rolling of eyesthey are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus

In their place a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glowup as they eagerly await a Christian prince to rule America These often bearded thirty and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit They are extremely online constantly posting on myriad platforms broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers Lets call them as one scholar I spoke with did the TheoBros

For all their youthful modishness this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts Many TheoBros for example dont think women belong in the pulpit or the voting boothand even want to repeal the 19th Amendment For some prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists like House Speaker Mike Johnson who are obsessed with the US Constitution many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments

In American Reformer their unofficial magazine hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside fullthroated defenses of countries that execute gay people On podcasts the TheoBros unpack the perils of multiculturalism expose Burning Mans wicked agenda and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift In Wolfes The Case for Christian Nationalism one of their seminal texts he writes that in an ideal Christian nation heretics could be executed

The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives Janet Mefferd a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction Im not sure what the endgame is other than they want to advance Christian nationalism she says But a lot of us find that terrifying

Im not sure what the endgame is other than they want to advance Christian nationalismbut a lot of us find that terrifying

The TheoBros strategy is bottomup They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves But it is also topdown Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power Vance a Catholic convert married to a Hindu would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America But over the last few years his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBrosso much so that to careful observers his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles

And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election hypermasculinity declining birthrates ethnonationalismand no small measure of carefully curated misogyny If you want to know some of the actors who redpilled Vance or at least those who flock to him you need to meet the TheoBros

With no meetings website or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs the TheoBros are not an official organization They identify with 16thcentury French theologian John Calvin who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism Julie Ingersoll a University of North Florida religion scholar traces the current movement back to RJ Rushdoony an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism and homeschooling in the early 1970s

Out of Rushdoonys movement emerged two camps the charismatic Christians now known as the New Apostolic Reformation and the reformed Protestants which include the TheoBros They share the goal of creating a Christian nation says Ingersoll but differ on a key point of theology Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets The TheoBros meanwhile believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible

Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism the idea that believers can hasten Jesus return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess TheoBro Aaron Renn an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit has described our current era as a negative world where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs Andrew Isker another Bro calls it trashworld

Like all selfrespecting millennials the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers with the exception of their patriarch Douglas Wilson a 71yearold pastor in Moscow Idaho When he was younger Wilson imagined himself going into the family businessChristian bookstoresbut after a stint in the military he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho where he became involved with the Jesus People a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture He helped found Christ Church the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1300

Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom He helped found New Saint Andrews College the Canon Press publishing house and Logos School one of the nations first classical Christian schools where students exclusively study the Western canon Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttonedup where women couldnt be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms In the early 1990s Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023

The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party A man penetrates conquers colonizes plants A woman receives surrenders accepts

His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy In a 2021 Vice exposé former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships That tracks with Wilsons 1999 book Fidelity How to Be a OneWoman Man in which he wrote The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party A man penetrates conquers colonizes plants A woman receives surrenders accepts For that reason Wilson wrote the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is an erotic necessity Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships categorically false

Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance In the 1996 book Southern Slavery As It Was Wilson and his coauthor argued that the masterslave dynamic was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence and there has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world as that of the antebellum South In a 2020 blog post Wilson said he now allows that while the benevolent master is not a myth the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker

In July at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC Wilson shared the stage with Sens Josh Hawley RMO Ron Johnson RWI and Mike Lee RUT as well as Vance who auditioned his America is a people bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention Wilson agrees with Vances suggestion that children should be allotted votes managed by their parents I would like to see elections where households vote he told me Men as the heads of households would actually cast the votes Though he believes that womens suffrage was a mistake he would allow a special exception for single mothers

Wilson offered the crowd a few oneliners Im a Presbyterian not a Lesbyterian but mostly he talked about the persecution of Christians It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet he mused Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet After the National Conservatism Conference Wilson appeared at the Believers Summit which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA

But its not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas He has a blog a podcast and a YouTube channel thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues One example is that every year since 2018 Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking In a 2023 video which was the brainchild of one of his sons Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table surrounded by his children and grandchildren and addresses the camera If you think of my blog as a shotgun he says this is the month when I saw off all my typical careful qualifications and blast away with a doublebarreled shorty His wife clad in an apron brings out a turkey and places it in front of him and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red perimeter breach sign Wilson excuses himself heads to his garage and straps on a flamethrower After using it to light a cigar he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel and the logos of Instagram TikTok Twitter and Netflix

Wilsons willingness to make campy content sets him apart says Rachel Tabachnick an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people hes like super cool she says Hes witty

In subsequent videos Wilson tackled womens culpability in rape the dark side of empathy and the virtues of something called the patriarchythat which according to our soidisant and lisping political theorists must be smashed Only they say something like thmasth

Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors all of whom happened to be men Mefferd the conservative Christian journalist told me that Wolfes The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part because Doug Wilson endorsed Another Wilson protégé is Joel Webbon a 38yearold pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show which he films from a wingback leather chair in a booklined room

Webbon wasnt always reformedhe is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit which he now considers straightup heretical In his 20s he broke from the group moved to Texas and started his own church In a video from a few years ago Webbon credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wantedlike telling a guest that the Founding Fathers werent responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving

Kamala sees happy large families and hates them She wants them destroyed She wants you to never be able to have this She is a nasty bitter harridan who hates all that is true good and beautiful

For Webbon it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled You stay in your little corner you stay on your little leash because youre like I dont know what will happen Webbon said But when you see some other guy do it and youre likethats the worst thing that can happen Vice writes an article about you Christianity Today editorinchief Russell Moore wont invite you to his birthday party anymore Like thats it At a recent conference he registered dismay over immigrants in his community Its like full straightup Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool that my daughter is asking about and Im trying to explain

In August he remarked on his show that a lot of people are gonna be surprised when youre spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E Lee and Jonathan Edwards and you know George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jrs in hell

Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which hes become embroiled There he explains why he called Christian men living in California stupid they could just move to a red state why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology he didnt want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure the Bible says so Webbon who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called Christ Is King How to Defeat Trashworld maintains that a return to the Constitution is impossible and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments

Some of Wilsons other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow Idaho Take Brian Sauvé a 33yearold Christian recording artist podcaster and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden Utah Like Webbon Sauvé wasnt always reformedRefuge began as a charismatic Christian church After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal the then24yearold Sauvé ascended to take his place immersed himself in reformed theology and moved the church in a new direction Today he presides over a Moscowesque ecosystem a publishing house called New Christendom Press as well as St Brendans Classical Christian Academy modeled after those in Wilsons network Can you feel it in the sails reads St Brendans website The stiff breeze out of Moscow Idaho We can

On his three podcasts and to his more than 53000 followers on X Sauvé regularly states that womens primary function is to bear children In July after Vances comments about childless cat ladies who are miserable began widely circulating he posted It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s realizing their irreversible mistake They will wish they could trade it allmoney vacations independence all of itfor children they can now never have

But unlike more mainstream conservatives Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a JudeoChristian nation He posted in July Our political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils

An even more wellconnected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding A former fellow of the rightwing think tank the Claremont Institute Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition strategic planning session hosted by the rightwing think tank the Heritage Foundation Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher In 2022 Buskirk cofounded the Rockbridge Network a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel Another cofounder of the Rockbridge Network None other than JD Vance

Thiel Vances mentor and former employer is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement Obsessed with global birthrates Thiel spent 10 million on his protégés successful 2022 Senate campaign In July shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Foundings network director Josh Clemans a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers The caption read Our guy

New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood who describes himself as an aspiring Christian warlord According to founder Nate Fischer New Founding wants to form the backbone of a renewed American regime and that its members understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise But its main publicfacing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities Promotional materials describe a community of unmatched seclusion where simple country faith protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime Potential buyers he advises should not delay Whos going to grab the land Is it going to be good based people who want to build something inspiring something authentic to the regions history or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California

One eager customer is 38yearold TheoBro Andrew Iskerthe pastor who interned at Wilsons church studied divinity at New Saint Andrews and cowrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab In July Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee Life in his native Minnesota he said had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life he said

That month Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the war on white America alongside Paul Gottfried the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project a farright group with ties to Sen Ted Cruz RTexas and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton

Like many TheoBros Isker sees much to like in Vance In early July before Trump announced his running mate Isker referred to him as Senator JD Vance RHeritage America In late July he posted a video of Vance and told his 29000 followers You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse Kamala sees happy large families and hates them She wants them destroyed She wants you to never be able to have this She is a nasty bitter harridan who hates all that is true good and beautiful

One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to Enter William Wolfe the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism Baptists are only the beginning Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream which he and other TheoBros refer to as Big Eva In August he posted on X Once you realize that Big Eva thinks its a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs heritage values and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb you can better understand their moral framework

Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation the archconservative think tank behind Project 2025 whose chief architect Russell Vought posted on X that he was proud to work with WilliamEWolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism A few months later the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists The document which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen Dusty Deevers as a coauthor called for civil magistrates to usher in the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation

The manifesto doesnt specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals As Tabachnick the extremism researcher interprets it the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses including the tech world that theyre mixing with so freely The key she said is that authoritarianism is required to have the utopian vision

Last year the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage There are times when even the God of peace proclaims by his providence to arms he says If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time to arms again I think we are getting close

William Wolfes Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media but in mainstream conservative outlets it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world In his book which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative Wolfe paints America as a gynocracy whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders Sound familiar He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote and that interethnic marriage can be sinful

Wolfe grew up in Napa California and his father was an admirer of the rightwing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan After attending West Point and serving in the Army Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to do the Wendell Berry thing in North Carolina with his wife and four kids

Over the summer Wolfe 41 agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as Dr Wolfe and call him an expert on Christian nationalism The Dr Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand Id watched online He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited Women would not be allowed to voteinstead men would vote for their households

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed he grew annoyed I do think its permissible in principle for a state to suppress theological heresy but that doesnt mean that its prudent or proper suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life The Founding Fathers he added had encouraged religious liberty so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé I think we need to reflect on this idea of JudeoChristianity or JudeoChristian worldview or JudeoChristian whatever and really eradicate that from our thinking Because if we say that America is a JudeoChristian country then it cant be a Christian country okay What role I asked him would Jews play After a deep sigh he told me that they would be allowed to exercise their religion freely

We need to reflect on this idea of JudeoChristianity or JudeoChristian worldview or JudeoChristian whatever and really eradicate that from our thinking Because if we say that America is a JudeoChristian country then it cant be a Christian country okay

We spoke a week before Vances RNC speech and Wolfes remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vances phrase about America as a people The founders Wolfe noted intended for their country to be AngloProtestant with an American inflection America he continued is a place of settlement and rootedness but its an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us Which is to say that like some others Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in Americaas long as they agree to assimilate to the AngloProtestant dominant culture

In this telling America is not a pluralistic society at all but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate Toward the end of our conversation I asked Wolfe what motivated him I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life and to seek to restore that he said This is a Christian country and weve got to work to restore it to what it once was

In his keynote address at Sauvés conference titled Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot an early 20thcentury idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident AngloProtestant establishment WASPs were the distinct ethnicity of America he insisted and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate As he put it This is our homeland and we welcome you on the condition of conformity Or in the words of JD Vance America is a group of people

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